Tag Archives: books

The first thing I did, when I received a review copy of 50 Best Places Fly Fishing The Northeast by Bob Mallard ($34.95, Stonefly Press), was flip to the Montauk section. Because even though the book is dominated by the region’s top trout waters, when I fall asleep at night I dream about salt. So I was pleased to see that the person selected to contribute the Montauk intel was Brendan McCarthy. While I have never personally fished with Brendan, I know a lot of people who have and he has an excellent reputation. Next I flipped to the Maine chapter and the section on Casco Bay. Eric Wallace wrote that one up, and he pioneered sight fishing for striped bass there.

Knowing that Mallard’s choices for those two contributions are legit makes it easy to extrapolate that he picked people who know what they’re talking about to profile the other 48 fisheries. Stonefly Press has a stable of these 50 Best Places books, including the 50 Best Tailwaters To Fly Fish.

This installment includes several venerable locales from Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Places like the Ausable, Salmon and all the Catskills spots in NY; the Housatonic and Farmington in CT; Cape Cod in MA, the Saco in New Hampshire and…well…there are 50 of them, you get the picture. So if you fish the Northeast or plan to, consider this a starting point, reference guide or inspiration to fish new waters.

I received a review copy a long time ago, August I think. I wanted to read through it before commenting. Seven months later, here are my thoughts.

This book surprised me. Hearing some pre-press buzz back in early 2010, I had expectations of this being an ego showcase for Andy Mill, regarded by many to be the best tarpon angler in the world. But it’s not that at all.

It features lengthy, unfiltered interviews with pioneers and legends like Steve Huff, Bill Curtis, Stu Apte, Sandy Moret, Tom McGuane and others. Steve Kantner, (the “Land Captain” and the king of Florida ditch fishing) contributed an essay on the history of chasing tarpon. Interspersed in between the historical chapters, Mill shares his thoughts on gear and technique.

If you’re heavily immersed in the tarpon culture you’ve probably already bought or considered buying this book so this may all be a moot point. But if you’re tangentially around it (like me, excluding ditch babies) I would make the case that the interviews alone make it worth the read. You could take notes from each one and assemble it into a timeline or concentrated history of modern saltwater fly fishing.

My personal favorite is the interview with Steve Huff, who has a wealth of interesting things to say. One here:

One time Sandy Moret and I were in Homosassa. He had on a grizzly fly with a red palmer. He was stripping this fly and this tarpon came up behind it and, you know, kind of sipping around but did not take the fly right away. And it was right on the end of his nose. You could see it. It was early in the morning so the fish was really close–like 20 feet away. He is not stripping it so fast. He is trying to feed this fish. The fish comes up and he takes the tail of the fly. He bites the tail. Sandy does not move it. He then comes up and he bites the center of the fly. We are watching this. And all you can see is the red palmer on his lips, and then he eats the rest in three bites. “

There’s a ton of anecdotes like this in the book. Whether they’re worth the $100 price of admission is up to you. But I dig them.

Tosh Brown and I have been working on making an idea for a book project a reality. A “large format pictorial on fly-fishing the Northeast coast” won’t work without large format-worthy pictures. So we’re blasting our way through some of the fall run this week.

The underwater housing is worth more than your life.

We’re in the middle of fishing around New York Metro and surrounding salt, with Tosh working the lens.

In 2007 David Kinney, a career newspaperman, dove headfirst into the collective insanity that is the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. The result is The Big One, an exhaustively researched window into the people and culture that fuel the derby, and the mania that fuels them.

It would be tempting to think this was an easy book to write; go fishing and then type it all out. That would be incorrect. Kinney deserves credit for gaining access to a group so paranoid and insular that getting any of them to talk and take him fishing is remarkable. (In fact, reading some passages, you’re left to wonder if the source is on the level or passing along blatant misinformation.)

Kinney weaves the narrative around a local angler named Lev Wlodyka, who during the tournament catches the fish of a lifetime and sparks a flurry of controversy that still reverbates in striper cirlces today. (Yo-yoing for stripers is a divisive fishing technique.) But Kinney fishes with just about everybody in the tournament; from shore, by boat, at night, at sunrise, on the jetty, in public spots and secret spots, with blue collar wharf rats and charter hiring blue bloods. He documents what the tourney means to them against the backdrop of evolving Vineyard life.

The book is not for everyone. Some may be turned off by what competitive fishing does to people. Others will blanch at the glorification of an all-kill tournament, a practice even a lot of hardcore anglers find outdated. If you’re comfortable with either notion, and have delved into northeast salt, you will enjoy this read.

Even if you’ve never been to the Vineyard or fished for striped bass, bluefish, albies, or bonito, there is one central theme you can take away from this book. And that is that the best fishermen are insane.

A guide in Alaska named Miles Nolte posts accounts from his life on the river into a thread on The Drake Magazine forums. The thread gets a following. One of the readers starts a publishing company. He signs up Nolte to write a book based on his thread:

Having spent many summers on a river where catching a muskellunge is an achievement that gets noted in the local paper, and having witnessed exactly one person hook one on the fly, I’ve looked forward to reading Muskie on the Fly, by Robert Tomes, as much as any other fly fishing instructional book. As someone who ranks the muskie high on his fly fishing wish list, I am not disappointed.

Muskie on the Fly falls in line with other books from Wild River Press, such as Fly Fishing for Striped Bass, in that it is obsessive, compulsive, and encyclopedic in its depth of coverage. And that it is packaged as an expensive glossy hardcover. As with the striper book, if someone buys this with the intent of leaving it on a coffee table, they are missing out. Reading this book will shorten your dues-paying casts from 10,000 down to about 8,000. (What, you were expecting instant gratification?)

A few years ago I had the opportunity to hear Tomes give a talk on muskie at a local fly fishing show, and he delivered an informative presentation along with a powerpoint slide show of adrenaline-spiking muskie pics. His was the only presentation where I actually learned something. Consider this book the expanded, way more in-depth version of that.